


A Very Dreemurr Christmas

by UnderAnon



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-10 18:18:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8928037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderAnon/pseuds/UnderAnon
Summary: Christmas is coming, and the Dreemurr family's getting ready for the holidays! Six magical children, a town full of monsters, and Yuletide cheer - what could possibly go wrong?





	1. The Trouble With Temmies

**\- This story takes place before the final chapter of** _**Inseparable** _ **. Most of this will be totally unfamiliar unless you've read that story. -**

The boys were home alone. Grandpa and Grandma were at some extra-boring international gala far from home, Dad was out doing something else in a different country (Gary, James' younger brother, hated hearing about that stuff- he was too kind for it), Uncle was at the hospital reversing people's shingles, and Mom was out with the girls doing "girl stuff", as she put it. James didn't know the details and wasn't sure if he wanted to.

Most ordinary parents would have balked at leaving an eight-year-old to supervise his close-to-seven and turning-six brothers. Nothing about James' life could be called ordinary by the standards of roughly two decades before his birth, before his uncle had shattered the barrier separating monsters from humanity. He didn't really realize this, because children don't. To him, monsters not being around and people not being able to cast magic were all part of the weird before-time that his parents and teachers talked about. He did know that his parents were extraordinary, even by the standards of his day- his mom really could go back and make bad things unhappen, the way every little kid cried for, and his dad was more or less unstoppable by any conventional metric. If anything went wrong, he had a lazy skeleton- and everyone else at Mt. Ebbot- to call upon, because he had a legitimate no-fooling royal title of _Prince_ and the door-opening, head-turning last name of _Dreemurr_. (He had a strong sense of justice, and tried not to abuse them.)

Not that he expected anything to go wrong. Mander, his youngest brother, had learned- occasionally the hard way- to curb his overconfidence. He was still completely fearless, eagerly clutching his brand new, bright orange, perfectly sized snowboard (an early birthday present) in his tough gloves and leading his older brothers up the same slope his parents had gone down many times before. Even more than his siblings, he loved downhill sports, which were generally safe because even if he hit a bump and went flying, he'd do just that: go flying. James tolerated his beloved brother's exuberance, as he had since Mander was born. The little boy was so hyper, so desperate for action every day, that James wondered if Mander thought that his lifespan was limited and he'd die before the Sun did.

Which was just silly. Mom wouldn't let that happen.

They reached the top and Mander sat down quickly, about to snap his boots to the board. "Wait," James demanded, and the little boy looked up at him impatiently. "You have to plan things, remember? Where are you going to go?" James tried not to be annoying about this stuff- that was usually his big sister's role- but he was the oldest there.

Mander planned a simple route that would have earned several black diamonds from pre-magic skiers. "Around those trees, and then a somersault off that ramp, and then down around that way, and then another-"

"hOI!"

The boys turned their heads sharply. The little creature had two pairs of ears: one pair like a cat, the other somewhat like their uncle's. She was vibrating rapidly in place, which was understandable because she was only wearing a blue shirt and it was bitterly, brutally cold outside, and this monster didn't look like one of the cold-favoring varieties.

"Who're you?" Gary asked, holding out a deep green mitten to beckon her closer. James looked at the creature more intensely- her face was vibrating in different directions than the rest of her. Monsters did weird things, sometimes, but he got the impression that this one was even more off-kilter than Gaster himself.

"i'm tEMMIE!" Temmie started walking towards the boys, and Mander dropped his snowboard to run up to her. She eagerly leapt into his arms, and as he caught her she dived into the neck of his snowsuit, making him yell in shock. She eagerly peeked out from his neck, making his brothers laugh. "human WARM!" Mander shouted again, flailing at his neck, not knowing what to do. If he used too much force, he'd kill her- monsters were fragile, after all- and he didn't really want to toss her back into the snow, but she was freezing cold!

"Just wait," James advised. "She's really light, so she'll warm up quick." Biting his lip, Mander forced himself to hold still, and Gary rubbed his nose into the little creature's nose, sharing the warmth and causing general giggling. James was right, as usual- Temmie was made of the same stuff their uncle was made of, not bones like the skelebros or water like humans. "What are you doing out here?"

"tem come for TEMMAS! but no room for tem... can tem stay wif u?"

"Sure," Gary said immediately. James wanted to argue but couldn't. The creature needed shelter, after all, and Mt. Ebbot was a sanctuary for monsters. Some local businesses had human employees, but the Dreemurrs and the Riddles were still the only humans allowed to live within the perimeter. "But we call it Christmas." James had heard that the monsters once called it something else, but he couldn't remember what it was. It was coming up exactly next week, six days after Nomie and Mander's sixth birthday and three days after Arial's ninth. (In the Dreemurr household, the holiday season was a hectic time. Fortunately, his mom controlled that.)

"yAyA! thank u! go inside nao?"

"Yeah," Mander agreed, "right now." He snapped his boots to his board in rapid succession and pointed himself downwards with magic. "Hang on, Temmie."

"yAyAyAAAAAAAAA!" Temmie squealed as Mander went blazing down the hill along the route he planned, around trees and doing a triple backflip off the ramp just because he could, his brothers following behind and laughing. "tem... dizzy..." A rainbow-colored stream of shredded paper flakes and hairballs came pouring out of her mouth. "tem frew up." Laughing in surprise, Mander patted his snowsuit down before realizing it was dry. He'd never seen a monster hurl before.

"You're weird, Temmie," the little boy said, patting her on the head.

"I'm perfectly normal," Temmie said in a clear, lucid voice, twisting her head around to look him in the eye. "It's the rest of you who are weird." Startled, Mander unzipped it and flung her out with magic. Landing on her feet, she gave an unreadable expression before strutting up to the Dreemurr doorway.

"James, we're not going to get in trouble, like with the rabbit?" Gary asked. Last summer, he'd seen a rather scruffy-looking rabbit along the bike path one day and had gotten close enough to levitate it. With his siblings giving him advice, he'd brought it home, fed it vegetables, and let it go, whereupon it promptly started chewing up Grandpa's flower garden.

"She's a monster," James said, opening the door and letting her bound inside. "If she does anything really bad, she'll have to deal with Grandpa."

Temmie turned around, sticking out her tongue. "fluffybuns ALWAYS nice to TEM." All three boys burst out laughing. They'd never heard their grandfather called that before. "tem hungry! wan tEMMIE flakes!"

"We don't have cereal," Gary replied. His grandmother still wouldn't keep it in the house. "I can cook you up some burgers." Toriel had specifically given him free reign of the kitchen months ago. He knew what he was doing in there.

"no! TEMMIE FLAKES!"

"It's not human food," Mander told his brother. "She barfed up colored paper." He giggled again.

"can smell... yAyA!" Abruptly, Temmie rocketed down the hall towards the children's rooms. James pursued, but once she turned a corner she vanished. James sputtered in confusion before hearing a loud sound of ripping coming from his little sister's room. If this thing had gotten into Shelly's books-! He threw open the door. Michelle kept a stash of construction paper for school projects, and Temmie was clawing it apart, leaving papers scattered around the room and eating it by the bite. "yayA! unprocessed tEmmIE flakes! homeMADE!"

"That's **not yours** ," James said, grabbing her by the scruff of her neck as she pouted. "Hey, I don't think we can leave her alone," he called back, making his littlest brother flop down onto the big couch in frustration. Mander had taken all that time to get ready and had just started to play outside, and now James was stuck babysitting Temmie and probably wouldn't let him go out by himself. Annoyed, he laid with his arm on the armrest, just above a pillow, which looked up at him, blinking.

"Gaaah!" Mander yelled, picking up the weirdly smiling Temmie from the couch. "There's two!"

Gary heard a clatter from under the kitchen sink and rushed to investigate. A pile of Temmies were crowded under the faucet. "There's more!" he yelled. "How'd they get in here?!" But he knew that was a silly question when he asked it. Monsters had their ways, and those ways didn't always involve Euclidean space.

Mander yelled again as he noticed what had happened to the Christmas tree. His father had freshly cut it down with his power, and the kids had enjoyed decorating it. Now the decorations were all over the floor, replaced by Temmies in the branches and a single Temmie where the star used to be, vibrating intensely. Other noises throughout the house- bedsprings creaking, furniture tumbling, the occasional clatter- suggested worse, and James rushed up the stairs when he heard the walk-in hair dryer turn on. Temmies whirled around in it, giggling, and they complained when he turned it off and ushered them out. He knew when it was time to call for help, and the skeleton picked up on the first ring. "Sans! Get in here now, we've got a problem!" he shouted, and James was sure that Sans could hear the shrieks of "yAyA! awwawa!" on his end as Temmies found other things to do. Sure enough, Sans came in the way the Temmies had, appearing in the center of the living room from nowhere. He looked around briefly, half-asleep, and all three boys were instantly certain that he wasn't going to do anything productive. Sometimes he did. Other times, not so much.

"Come on, Sans," Gary begged. "You've gotta help us."

"sure, I'll help, best way I know how." He pulled out his own phone and called their mother, who said she was almost home.

"Sans! Can't you at least tell them to get out of here?!" James shouted.

"sure. get out of here," he told one of the Temmies, who stuck her tongue out at him in response. Another Temmie leapt onto him and tried to make a home in his ribcage. "welp, that's about my limit. good luck. seeya." He vanished the way he came, leaving the confused Temmie falling to the floor.

"Oh yeah, **that'** s a big help," James muttered. His dad had once used the words 'and then you escalate things' with him. He had very seldom seen any need to escalate things, but this looked like it fit the bill. "All right, Temmies- **time to leave**." He stuck out his finger and pointed a yellow laser at the nearest one at a sub-burning intensity. Abruptly, the Temmie twisted away and then tried to catch the yellow dot on the carpet. The other Temmies in the room followed suit, jumping on the little bright dot en masse. James, realizing instantly what to do, fired another laser at a different part of the room, and more Temmies, hearing the commotion and rushing from all over the house, bounding down stairs and throwing open doors, attacked the other dot, leaping off the walls to pounce on it. He fired more lasers, but he couldn't keep that kind of concentration up forever. "Open the door, quick!" he shouted, and Mander flew into action, opening the door to the foyer in an instant, his brother leading the Temmies right behind him. He threw the large outside door open with magic, and James laser-pointed the Temmie horde right out the door-

Just as his mother and sisters came walking up the path in their Dreemurr-fur Christmas finery, hair done and nails painted, unprepared for the weight of a hundred Temmies to descend upon them.

Of course, that was only about fifty pounds.

Nomie simply jumped into the air and stayed there, her dress fluttering in the wind. Michelle knelt down and protected her head against the rush. Arial leapt twenty feet to the left. Frisk, her reflexes completely undiminished by motherhood, stuttered out a rapid-fire chain of syllables, neutralizing relative momentum and canceling gravity within a roughly ten-meter radius, and the floating mass of Temmies spun end-over-end around her as she gently batted a few of them out of the way.

"SpaaaaaaaceOOMPH," one of the Temmies said, floating out of the zone and falling into a snowbank.

Frisk canceled the spell, letting the little creatures fall around her like a toy store accident, and her daughters clustered around her, brushing snow off their dresses. She gave a stern, motherly look to her boys, arms folded, managing to keep the smirk off her face. If she said anything, she'd burst out laughing.

"Mom! I didn't know you were there, I just wanted to lead them out!" James explained.

"We tried to invite **one** because she was cold," Gary added. "Not **all** of them."

Frisk let herself chuckle. "Inside, kids." She turned to the creatures. "Temmie, it's a week early. We told you there's no room for all of you yet. Temmas will be held in the school gym, remember?"

"but tEMMIE LIVs HERE!"

"No," Frisk explained patiently, knowing that the Temmies would never really understand, " **some** Temmies live here. Isn't that why you needed to come into our house? Because there's no room for all of you? Well, you're just going to have to crowd in a little more, or rent somebody else's space, because I'm not going to let you keep pestering my kids."

"You will regret this," one of the Temmies said, flicking her tail.

"That sounded an awful lot like 'I really want to meet your husband, please introduce me to him,'" Frisk replied, and the Temmies scattered off. Sighing and shaking her head, Frisk walked into her home, while James was trying to explain to a moderately annoyed Michelle what Temmie had done with her construction paper; she had plenty of the stuff, and she'd persevere. Arial was surveying the damage. The rampaging horde of Temmies had knocked over a lot of furniture and made a mess of the Christmas decorations, but the Dreemurrs didn't keep fragile objects lying around, not with six flying kids in the house.

"Okay, kids, come here and let me explain," Frisk said, sniffling a bit. They gathered around as she picked up a comfortable chair and sat down. "Most Temmies don't really have much of a concept of self. When you invite one Temmie, you invite all the Temmies. Almost every Temmie is Temmie, and Temmie is almost every Temmie. Not quite a hive mind, but- choo!- close."

"Mom, are you sick?" Arial asked.

"No, I think- snff- I'm allergic to Temmies. Which means it's time to get out the vacuum cleaners." She was glad her kids weren't allergic to anything. Asriel had made sure of that. "Let's all clean this place up."

"Us, too? We didn't cause this," Michelle complained.

"We didn't cause it either!" James replied.

"It's a family project, not a punishment," Frisk said. "It's Temmie's fault, and I don't think Temmie's going to remove Temmie dander."

"This is actually going to happen, isn't it?" Arial quietly asked as the others started hanging decorations back up and picking up furniture. She'd be a rememberer on her birthday in four days.

"Yeah, the first time, the boys were bored coming with us. Too much 'girl stuff'. So I left them at home, what's the worst that could happen, right?" She laughed despite her watering eyes and nose. Her kids, despite- or perhaps **because of** \- their magical and genetic enhancements, always found ways to surprise her. As she aired out the house in the freezing December weather and went over corners and edges, one hand on the vacuum cleaner and the other with a handkerchief on her face, she was equal parts perturbed and dismayed, frustrated with the constant surprise annoyances of motherhood, and she would not have traded them for anything in the world.


	2. Fraternal

Most kids would be happy to have their birthdays on a weekend, but Mander and Nomie were moderately dismayed at it. They were turning six, and they liked the idea of their classmates wishing them each a happy birthday. (They surely would, if because of the whole _Dreemurr_ thing if nothing else.) Their uncle had come in just before the kids' bedtime, and they all fell over each other telling him about the Temmies, and their mom had gone from room to room, tucking each of her children in as she did every night without fail.

Mander woke up super early, long before dawn. This was unusual for him; normally he slept soundly, his body completely tired out from his regular exertions, but those days weren't his sixth birthday. It was just a number, as his family had explained to him, just a changeover with a celebration and some presents, and he'd already received the snowboard he really wanted, but he couldn't help his excitement. He was six! He tossed off the covers, flew out of bed- flew, just because he could, even if it did wear him out quickly- and remembered that he wasn't the only one turning six that day. He had to be nice to his twin sister, so quietly floating to her room (it wouldn't be fair to wake his other siblings up, **they** weren't turning six), he let his feet rest on the carpet and gently tapped her awake.

She'd expected this, of course. She'd learned to expect things like this before she learned how to talk. She'd even planned what to say, something that made her sound grown-up but still fell within the boundaries of 'be nice to your twin brother'. "I want sleep for **my** birthday, Mander," she said, and theatrically pulled the covers over her head.

Mander had learned to expect things like that from her, too, and stuck his tongue out at her even if she couldn't see it. Tip-toeing out of the room and quietly closing the door behind him, he went potty, brushed his teeth, and headed to the living room, looking for things to do. He knew better than to turn on the TV on a Sunday morning, not if he didn't want to hear his parents' names used a lot, right alongside some weird, creepy names and ideas he'd never heard anywhere else. To his surprise, the TV was already on, the volume turned down very low, his uncle relaxing on the couch and starting to watch one of the newer Batman movies, one that Mander hadn't seen yet. (Most of the superhero genre had been gutted when human beings gained actual powers. Batman, who had no powers, had survived the transition.)

"Happy birthday, Mander, you can watch it with me," Asriel said just loud enough for Mander to hear, turning the volume up to something more suitable for humans, "but keep quiet when your dad comes in, okay?"

"Okay..." Mander said, wondering why his uncle would want that, and quickly became engrossed in the movie. He loved action-packed movies, because they did awesome things you couldn't do in real life; Mander had once asked what spells the characters in a Michael Bay movie were casting, and his mother had informed him what special effects are. Sitting with his uncle was nice, because Asriel was big and fluffy and soft, and Mander- having learned not to pull or pinch- could sink into his uncle's fur almost as thoroughly as he could his grandparents'. Asriel put his soft arm around the boy, and Mander thoroughly relaxed, a thing he seldom did. Asriel smiled, feeling the boy's warmth, ensuring his health, feeling the agonizingly familiar glow of his SOUL.

Charles came staggering in ten minutes later, his right hand holding his left shoulder. Mander ran towards him, but once he got a good look, he covered his own mouth so he wouldn't yell. Dad looked worse than the bad guys did in the movie after Batman was done with them! He wore thick, modern armor, which was dented and smashed in places, and around his injured shoulder it had been blown to pieces. He was coated in a thin sheet of grime, and his hands and smashed-up boots were covered with something crusty and dark brown. The very first words out of his mouth, however, were "Happy birthday, Mander," making his son smile with glee. "Dislocated, had to pop it back in," he told his brother. "Blind luck with a fifty cal. Still hurts, something's cracked?"

His brother laid a fluffy hand on his injured shoulder. "Yeah, there's a hairline fracture, just relax," Asriel said, and Charles had to consciously drop his innate magic resistance to let his brother heal it. Small bone fractures were nothing to Asriel, who'd had to jigsaw-puzzle smashed bones together and do other gory doctor stuff that Mander and James couldn't help but want to hear about.

"Dad, what'd you **do**?!" Mander asked quietly.

"Foiled the evil plans of a dastardly moon cult," Charles replied. "No, I **won't** talk about it. Go back to your movie. I've got to take a bath." His brother went with him, to heal overstretched ligaments and help him look presentable, and Mander was left alone with the movie and his rapid-fire thoughts. Obviously Dad didn't want Mom or Mander's sisters to see him all messed up like that. And Mander probably would have yelled when Dad came home, so his uncle was right in telling him not to. But why was Asriel already up, waiting for him, playing a movie that Mander wanted to watch? Well, yeah, they all had phones and Dad could have called, but it was almost as if Asriel had somehow known that Mander would-

It was almost as if his uncle **hadn't** been there on the first version of reality, and Mander **had** yelled that Dad was home, so his family **had** seen him like that, and of course the adults didn't want that to happen so they used Mom's power to do things differently.

Proud of himself for figuring it out, Mander went back to being engrossed in the movie, and his uncle and dad- warm and clean and in fresh clothes- came down to watch it with him. (Dad was harder to hug than Asriel. When Dad put his arm around Mander, even though he was being very careful, it was like being hugged by a stone golem.) Batman had to stop Scarecrow and the Joker from drugging people's brains to create a horde of evil monsters, and the movie had reached its climax when his grandmother and middle brother came in and wished him a happy birthday.

"I see you have gotten a head start on your sister," Toriel said, smiling.

"She didn't want to get up early," Mander explained, eyes still fixed on the screen. "I asked."

"She will get up in her own time," Toriel replied, amused, then turned to her son. "Charles, did everything go well this morning?"

"Perfectly," Charles replied. "Don't worry about it." Mander knew what they were talking about and was even more proud of himself. Adults didn't always realize how smart he was- how smart any of his siblings were, either- even though his parents and uncle had done special things to make them that way. Mander could have shouted the truth, something like 'Dad's hands and feet were super dirty when he came home, and he didn't want you to know how dirty he got', but that would be a mean thing to do and Mander didn't want to be mean.

Nomie snuck in as Mander's movie finished, her socks light on the carpet. She'd changed out of her pajamas, into a cute, light blue dress and hair ribbons fit for the birthday girl, and as he got up the moment the credits started she was standing in the exact right spot to surprise him. He didn't act surprised at being surprised; she so often surprised him that her surprises were no longer a surprise. Their father and uncle chuckled together. Mander and Nomie usually didn't get mad at each other; their family had mostly gotten them to stop doing that at a very young age. "Happy birthday, Mander!" She'd planned on saying it, but she'd just realized that she was going to have to deal with her hyper six-year-old twin brother for a whole **year**. And **then** she'd have to deal with her hyper **seven** -year-old twin brother for another year! She was patient, but she wasn't sure if she had the patience to deal with him that long. She wished for a friend who could understand what it was like dealing with him.

"Happy birthday, Nomie," he replied along with his father and uncle, and his grandmother and middle brother called the same back from the kitchen, and his sister beamed happily. He realized that he'd have to put up with his annoying six-year-old twin sister for Arial's birthday, Christmas, the rest of the school year, all his siblings' birthdays, summer vacation, and yet even more school, before he'd have to do it all over again, only they'd be seven. He was brave, but he quailed at the thought, and he wished that he knew someone who understood what it was like having to put up with her.

At least they'd have cake to eat. The Dreemurrs kept a large table, in every sense of the word- physically large to accomodate the three great monsters who sat at it, large in the variety and quality of the delicious meals it hosted, large in the amount of food served at it regularly (much of it to sate Charles' supernatural hunger), and large in the number of people who sat at it, both regularly and for special occasions. Toriel had help, of course, particularly from her very talented grandson, but she would have been fine with doing it all herself. Having promising children grow up into distinguished adults was her raison d' etre and a goal she had accomplished beyond her wildest imaginings. It was the idea of not having children to nurture that scared her- that one day there would be a generation of advanced humans whom she could no longer comprehend, leaving her adrift and effectively senile.

But she was Toriel Dreemurr, Queen of Monsters, and she had endured the pain of losing children over and over again and the indescribable joy of having one come back to her, two more return from the dead by different methods, and six more with their SOULs drawn to new bodies.

"Nomie, Mander," she called out in a comforting, sing-song voice, "would you please set the table while we get your cake ready?" The children seldom complained about doing chores. Their mother and grandmother had made it very clear that they needed to live as independent adults one day, and their father had told scary stories about people who couldn't live as independent adults because they didn't know how. (The kids still didn't know what 'chicken tendies' were, nor did they understand the etymology of 'REEEEEE'.) Of course, Nomie had to be as fast and accurate in flying from place to place and setting down the plates and utensils as her brother; she couldn't be shown up by him! Both of them were wondering why Grandma was setting up the table now if the cake had just started baking-

"Azzy, Charlie, would you please help us with breakfast?" Mander and Nomie inwardly winced, not wanting to let the other know that they were being stupid. Of course they still had to eat a real breakfast, the same way they did every morning. Their grandmother still called their uncle, by far the pre-eminent doctor in the entire country, Azzy from time to time, which the kids found silly and funny. They didn't realize how silly and funny it was for her to call their dad Charlie and ask him to make breakfast, which he happily did, cutting open the eggs and peppers by ripping open reality as only he could (his children loved the idea of eating something that couldn't exist anywhere else). Anyone on the receiving end of Charles, formerly known as Chara and commonly known as the Devil, would have never imagined that he was so nice to his own children and would do practically anything for his family.

"Somebody changed the pigs' diet," Asriel knew on touching the bacon.

"Yes, the butcher assured me it was healthier," his mother replied. Her response to nearly any food-related concern was to get as close as she could to the source, generally eschewing anything pre-made. She liked things farmed locally, very locally, and she greatly favored snails that she picked off her husband's plants. The house tended to smell like a commercial bakery or a fancy restaurant, depending on the time of day, and the smells woke the rest of her family up as they so often did. Arial and Michelle came in together, then James, and they wished their little siblings a happy birthday in the same way, by addressing them as "you two" even though they sat on opposite sides of the table, facing each other. At least the rest of their family had been nice enough to wish them happy birthdays separately.

His Majesty, Asgore Dreemurr, took his great steps down the stairs with his robe dragging on the carpet, preparing to endure yet another celebration, yet another Special Event of the sort of which a King must take part, even if simply to mark the passing of another year of two of his grandchildren's lives. But he endured these birthdays willingly, for they would come and go like the wind and then his grandchildren would go as well, off to college and opportunities and the vast reaches of the universe, and whether they returned one day or not was wholly up to them. "Six years old today," he rumbled. "These years, I have asked my other grandchildren what it is like to be six years old, and I have never received a satisfactory answer, for what do you have to compare it to other than being five? How can I expect a child to tell me what it means to be a child? Yet you're the only ones who truly know." Asgore and Toriel had never been children, springing fully formed from human dreams like other monsters did, and it occasionally showed.

"Mom says it should be about learning and having fun, but that's for five year olds too," Gary answered him, still being six.

"Yes, you can tell me what your mother told you," his grandfather replied, chuckling, "and she can even let me know some of what it feels like." Frisk had thoroughly mastered Gaster's emotional transfer, which tended to hit monsters hard. "But I will never understand how a human experiences growing up. Nomie and Mander, I do wish you a happy birthday together," he said as he walked down, and they couldn't figure out if he was being nice by addressing them separately or being mean by reminding them that they had to spend it together.

And then their mother came down the stairs, wearing her Christmasy dress with a red heart on the center, silently taking graceful, reduced-gravity steps. "Mander, Nomie," she said as she took her seat at the breakfast table, "I will give you your first and most important present of the day after we're done eating breakfast." Frisk kind of sounded like her own mother, which was what she was going for, although her voice hadn't changed in the slightest since she was in college. Asriel had placed six embryos into her body and drawn six babies out, and she still looked like she was in her early twenties.

"Dad, where **were** you yesterday?" James asked.

"You know I don't talk about that at the table," Charles replied patiently.

"You don't really talk about what you do **ever** ," James pointed out.

"You can get the answers you want, if you actually want them," Charles said, very gently. The kids had unfiltered Internet access; the last thing their parents wanted was for them to have to go behind their parents' backs to get it. "But you're eight years old, still. Enjoy your childhood while you have it. Make sure you really want to know before you go poking into things." Arial used to want to know, and she'd researched it once. Once.

Toriel began passing around full plates and there would be no more talking from Charles for some time, as he shoveled crisp bacon and homemade omelets into his face. His kids enjoyed watching him eat almost as much as they enjoyed eating his cooking. There weren't any pancakes or other sugary foods on the table, because it was a cake day. There were five of those a year in the Dreemurr household, as James' birthday coincided with Frisk's, the same day she reserved for Asriel's and Charles' unknown birthdays.

The kids spent the morning telling the same story they'd told to Asriel when he'd come home. Asgore seemed mildly amused at the idea of an invasion of Temmies, and Charles almost spit out his food laughing when hearing about how James got them out. _Can't fool me, Dad, I know it's a repeated day_ , Mander thought smugly.

"It's time for your present," Frisk said, and she led her two youngest upstairs. A secret present? Mander was happy, but Nomie suspected that it probably wouldn't be anything good. Frisk's youngest children were too big to sit on her lap together, so she gestured them to her sides as she sat on the bed, and she held them both. "Your present is something very special," Frisk began.

"Is it a **lecture**?" Nomie asked, and Mander gasped in betrayal.

"It is, but I don't want you to walk out of here feeling lectured, okay?"

"Is it the same lecture you gave us the first time?" Mander asked, fidgeting under his mother's arm.

"You know today's repeated?" Nomie asked, and her brother affirmed it. "Then it's not the same lecture, something **bad** happened today," she was sure of.

Frisk exhaled, laughing. "We spent so much time and effort into making you so precocious, do you know that?" The kids didn't know the word, and she spelled it for them on her phone. "Pre-co-chuss. It means you're acting older than other kids your age. And no, it wasn't that bad. It's just that... well, your grandfather is right. We can't know what it's like to be you at six years old. Just like you don't know what you have. There's an old saying, you don't know what you have until it's gone. Well, for you, it will never **be** gone, because I won't let it. But that doesn't mean it isn't precious." Her children looked confused at that last word. "There's precious, which means very valuable, and there's precocious, and you're both." She chuckled. "So. What happened today was, you got mad at having to share a birthday. You asked for a separate cake," she told her son, "and you asked to have your birthday tomorrow," she told her daughter. Frisk chuckled again. "And I fell down a hole so I could have problems like yours. Did you know your uncle and I were attached to each other for years after he broke the barrier? He'd lost his SOUL and needed to use mine, and all I could think was that I couldn't ever lose him because I'd never had someone like him before. We had special bracelets, repeaters..."

"I wish Asri had kids," Nomie said. "Then we could all have goat friends." Frisk laughed deeply.

"Yeah, that'd be a **great** birthday present," Mander agreed.

"He'll find his own wife in time, and even if he did have children right away, they'd be too young for you to play with. But you have something else. You have each other. And I know, you two are so different. You wait just to surprise your brother, and you're in such a hurry to start your birthday, you don't even change out of your pajamas."

"He woke me up really early," Nomie complained. "I got back into my dream, it was hard."

"I thought waking you up was nice," Mander said.

"It **wasn't** ," Nomie replied, annoyed. "Mom, can we get him a leash? We can hook him to something outside on Christmas so he won't bother us."

"Can we put a door lock on the outside of her room?" Mander suggested. "So we can just leave her in there so nobody bothers her for Christmas by herself?"

"If you keep being mean to each other, I'll give you **both** exactly what you just asked for," Frisk replied, and the twins shuddered. "Or I'll leash you together for Christmas." They shuddered more. "That way, you'll stay together when I drop you off at the orphanage, and a poor little girl in a trailer park can get a pair of Dreemurrs under the tree."

"Mommmm!" Mander yelled.

"Now **you're** being mean," Nomie complained.

Frisk would have been even meaner, but the kids didn't know words like 'cat lady' or 'spinster', and they weren't clear what a 'bum' was nor did they have any idea how truly awful families could be, and Frisk wasn't about to tell them. Pulling out a 'When I was your age' was something she never wanted to do. Frisk was miserable at their age. "I know," Frisk said instead. "And if you really don't want to be treated like twins anymore, I suppose I really could arrange that. You'll have different birthdays, go to school at different times, you'll be as apart as I can make you." She didn't need to be a professional to feel her children's deep-seated fear at that suggestion. "You don't actually want that, do you?" Nomie and Mander stayed quiet, caught between two bad choices. They weren't old enough to differentiate between what they thought they wanted and what they actually wanted. "You don't **have** to be together. You **get** to. Even though you're completely different. That's your best birthday present." The smell of freshly baked birthday cake wafted up from the dining room. "Now hold hands, you two, and walk downstairs like that. Then, you can have a happy birthday with each other, okay?" With Nomie pouting and Mander grumbling, the kids obeyed, Mander reaching out his right hand and Nomie taking it in her left, and he slowed down too much for her and she sped up too much for him, and they were matching steps by the time they got to the bottom of the stairs, their mother close behind. They returned to the table and, from opposite sides of it, blew the six candles out with a vortex of magical wind, and their family clapped.

There was always enough cake for everybody, and of course the children were always full before the last of the cake vanished down adult gullets. Nomie tried to get as much taste as she could out of every bite, while Mander ate like his father, gobbling it up because it was his birthday cake and that's what it was for.

Then they started unwrapping presents, which were cleanly wrapped in light blue and orange paper to differentiate them from the Christmas presents they'd be getting in six days. Nomie's presents, with the wrappers torn apart in one good yank, were a large, beautiful magic-controlled kite and a surprisingly realistic doll. Mander shredded the wrappers to get a car playset with sensors that followed bright laser light ("They're just like the Temmies!") and an inflatable ball with rubber spikes that changed the way it bounced. But their most astonishing present was a video game for their thirteenth-generation Sega console, a co-op action RPG (RPGs hadn't been made with the concepts of 'experience' or 'leveling up' in decades- they wouldn't even remake those anymore) that featured two players with entirely different and complementary abilities. Various rumor-mongering sites had claimed that the developer had a working playable framework but ran out of funding; they got an angel investor to front the money, although executive meddling had imposed a pre-Christmas deadline and a few changes to the game's structure. Only the real conspiracists cared that the investment firm had ties to the Dreemurrs. The kids took the characters' resemblance to themselves as pure coincidence.

Of course, as fun as it was, Mander didn't want to sit still for that long and Nomie's legs were starting to get restless, so after a short while they grabbed their matching snowboards and headed up the hill, where they used their magic and a snow shovel to make new ramps to flip from. Naturally, they had to make the twin ramps look like goat horns, and then they had to make a large sculpture of a goat face to match the horns (which Dreemurr it was, was up for debate), and only then did they start doing runs downhill, learning to keep up with each other.

Exhaustion set in, and dinner was quite welcome to their stomachs, and then their mother called them to the couch whereupon the whole family, all eleven of them, watched a brand-new Christmas special featuring various characters of the decade. In quality and tone, it was one of the best things they could watch together, and Shelly watched in rapt fascination and even Arial started smiling and tearing up. (She was turning **nine** , after all, which she considered too old to cry at children's movies.)

Only Mander didn't react to it. He'd fallen asleep, his head resting on his grandfather's fluffy body, almost as soon as it started.


	3. Integrity

Arial once thought that a whispered "do you know who that is" was a greeting of some kind, some sort of secret handshake that the daycare lady gave with parents bringing in their children. It wasn't until later, after Frisk moved back in with her parents but before Arial found out the truth about her SOUL, that she figured out that it was referring to her and her siblings. That was about the time when she'd been given a very special talk, in which Frisk had told her that she'd always be treated special by other people no matter what she did, and Frisk knew it wasn't fair and Arial knew it wasn't fair, but the little girl had a royal title and a pair of deific parents to live up to, and there was no getting away from that. Mom had held her until her tears dried up.

But she wasn't a little kid anymore, she was nine, nine years old and with a big brain and a huge spell list, and she actually knew what all the spell-words meant. Her little sister did too, which Arial found impressive and her parents found a little scary. They'd taught Michelle to always write down her spells, run them through a calculator first, and never, ever cast anything that her little body couldn't support. Arial had helped teach her, and it'd only strengthened their bond. Arial felt responsible for all her siblings, but she tended to spend time with Michelle the most, because Nomie was too little and the other three were (ugh) boys. Besides, somebody had to get Shelly out of her room and away from her books sometimes. There were **monsters** to meet, and some of them didn't even go to their school.

The adults had decided that the six-year-olds' birthday party would be just with their family, probably because their birthday was close to Christmas and because it was guaranteed to be hectic even without more people. Arial was old enough to plan her **own** party, thank you very much, and she'd expected her mother to complain when she said that to her; instead, Frisk was proud of her and had only restricted the number of people she was allowed to invite and how long it could last. (The room set aside for guests and events wasn't infinitely large, and the week before Christmas was test time.) Arial had picked out her school friends, an eclectic selection of humans (no boys) and monsters, and she'd told her grandmother in advance because one rule of the Dreemurr household was There Shalt Be Enough Cake for Everyone. She even shared the same birthday with a friend named Mindy, who'd told her mother that what she wanted for her birthday was to go to Arial's birthday party. Mindy's mother had immediately agreed and told her to be on her best behavior. Another one of those 'being a Dreemurr' things, Arial and Mindy had agreed. Her friends and siblings weren't expected to bring presents, either, because they already knew that she pretty much got anything she wanted anyway.

Besides, Arial had already received her real, secret present early that morning, just before her mother SAVEd the state of the entire universe. She had access to the memory password, the youngest person to have it, which meant that she'd repeat every day of her life from then on. It made her a bit anxious, having a power that her friends didn't, but of course her parents had just laughed and asked "Well, how do you think **we** feel?" and reminded her that with power comes responsibility. Arial was used to responsibility; it was in her nature, and she'd spent her life with five little siblings to take care of, after all.

The only thing she didn't like about her birthday was that it fell on a Wednesday that year. That was the day when all her classes gave their 'No, Really, This Is the Big Test of the Semester So Get Ready to Suffer' tests, the kind of classes that separated "middle school" big girls like her and her (mostly older) friends from "elementary school" little kids like her siblings. (Toriel's school had never followed a standard grade-level system, and Arial didn't know what 'elementary school' and 'middle school' were until her grandmother had explained them.) The next day, the teachers would prepare their students for the next semester; Friday was Christmas Eve.

Arial didn't worry about it. Tests were easy; birthdays were hard. Gym class was the only exception; Undyne's idea of a final gym test was a blisteringly brutal obstacle course that required intense application of magic and muscle. There were no waivers for physical disability or incapacity, not when every human student in the school had a visit with Asriel every semester. Mindy and Arial were the youngest in that class as well, but Mindy took regular ballet classes that gave her plenty of stamina and Arial was **Arial Dreemurr** and would not be surpassed by anyone other than the most athletic older kids. Undyne did, in fact, understand mercy; even the fattest kid, who was barely awake near the end and had Twinkie-smelling vomit covering his shirt, got a C-.

Mindy and Arial were joking about him as they waited for their friends to meet up outside the school. It wasn't nice to joke about people who weren't there, Arial knew, but Mindy was having fun not being nice, and she looked like she needed to distract herself from something. _Besides_ , Arial thought with guilty pleasure, _this won't actually have happened._ She didn't like keeping secrets from her friends, but her mother and grandmother- who had worked out an educational plan for her long in advance- had convinced her that it was a good idea. Her friends and siblings convinced her of another good idea: Pop the safety cap off Magmus, the Vulkin member of their group, and cluster around him for warmth, especially as they walked up the hill. There were a lot of introductions going on, although most of them were one-way. James and Shelly tried to remember all of Arial's friends' names, Gary was good with people so didn't have to try, and Mander and Nomie were just too young to be expected to remember any of that stuff. Arial had invited three other slightly older girls (Betty, Jennifer, and Janice), the Ur-Sign Arthur, who couldn't talk but whose bearlike body featured a color-changing board prominently in his hefty middle, Lucretia, a golden dragon who was mostly wings, and Kid and Kim, who were already waiting for her at home.

"Oh my God, Arial, you didn't tell me you **knew** them!" Janice squealed. This was typical for her, and Arial just laughed. It was nice not being paid the most attention to. Kid and Kim worked as freelance actors, hosting a wide variety of shows on all the major video channels (there was no longer any difference between 'television' and 'video streaming sites'), especially Mettaton's. Arthur showed a faithful rendition of them hosting Super-Gaming Live! on his signboard, and the group clapped.

Betty was looking around with every step she took, and Arial could practically read her mind. Betty's vice was envy, and she'd always wanted to know what the inside of the Dreemurr mansion looked like. She was expecting ostentation but found strict cleanliness and organization instead; Toriel's husband often brought home gifts from around the world, but all such displays were behind glass recessed into the wall. Colorful carpet covered most floors, and nothing was ever left out for someone to knock over and break. (Arial had told her friends about the Temmies, and Betty realized why the place hadn't turned into a complete wreck.)

Jennifer took a big whiff through her small nose. "It smells like cake in here," she said, smiling.

"That's because it is," Gary replied, tossing off his overcoat and heading to the kitchen. Toriel had rushed home to start baking a layered cake before rushing back to the school, and the oven's timer had shut it off minutes ago. Icing and other edible decorations were neatly arranged on the counter. "Help me put this together," Gary said, and the group enjoyed building the cake, arranging the candy flowers, and putting nine candles on top, setting the confection onto the dining room table. They needed no lighter. Singing Happy Birthday, the kids had a wonderful little celebration all by themselves with no adults to mess things up. Arial blew the candles out with Mindy the same way her twin siblings did (Mindy seemed hesitant for some reason), and then they started eating and it was pure heaven, although it was funny watching Lucretia eat with her long neck, whiplike tongue, and dislike of utensils. There was still too much cake for everyone, so they retreated to the reception room to play.

"Mindy, I have a birthday present for you," Arial said, smiling. She picked up a small package out of the corner of the room and delicately unwrapped it for her friend, showing the bright red heart on a silver chain. "It's the same kind of locket my uncle gave my dad way back when." Mindy gasped and thanked her, just as Arial knew she would, and Arial was proud and happy because Mindy was officially her best friend forever and she officially had someone outside of her family to tell all her problems to, and Mindy could tell her all her problems too. She just wished that Mindy would do that, because there was definitely something weighing on her mind.

The party continued, with Betty carefully exploring the common rooms and Janice asking Kid and Kim about their exploits. Shelly was playing with the Ur-Sign, the bear letting the little girl use him as a markerboard with her finger. Arial found it hard to keep track of her friends. She didn't have to watch them- it wasn't that Magmus would pop off his lava cap or Lucretia would start breathing fire indoors- but she felt like she needed to be on high alert for drama, because there was almost always drama, as Mindy had tried to warn her. Arial didn't see the danger. Maybe drama was something that only happened at Mindy's house? Arial was about to quietly ask her something about it, as Arthur showed a rapt Shelly what he could do with his signboard and Nomie and Mander looked over Lucretia's gleaming scales, but Mindy had grown downcast and didn't seem interested in talking. Which was really bad to be at their birthday party.

"Hey, Mindy, what's going on?" Arial quietly asked.

"Nothing," Mindy replied, but it was so obviously not nothing that she had to continue. "I think I screwed up a test."

"Which one?" She was briefly distracted by the outside door opening. Lucretia had taken the twins outside. That dragon loved it when people paid attention to her flying. James had brought Jennifer outside with them, and Arial vaguely wondered if Jennifer had some kind of puppy-love crush on her little brother.

"Recent American History, the politics part. The birth certificate thing was part of why Obama lost to Donald Trump, right?"

"No, he didn't run against Donald Trump. That was Hillary Clinton," Arial informed her friend, and the sheer terror on Mindy's face took Arial off guard. Mindy's hands started shaking slightly, and Arial spotted tears forming in her eyes. Arial blamed their teacher, who had gone over about 40 years of pre-Return election history for a couple of weeks a few months ago and was sadistic enough to put it as a critical, essay-question part of the final exam. Post-Return politics were going to be covered next semester, and Arial expected herself to score perfectly on every single assignment, quiz, and test involving that stuff because studying involved **asking her mom**.

"That... no, that can't be, I though Hillary lost to Obama..."

"She did, I think, but that was way earlier." She checked her phone, sitting next to her friend, who was quivering with disbelief. "Yeah, see? That was during the 2008 primary, before the email stuff in 2016."

"I thought the emails were in the primary..."

"No, they couldn't be. All that stuff happened after she was working for him." Arial couldn't remember if it was 'after' or 'while', but that wasn't on the test. Mindy became even more distraught, and Arial tried to console her, reaching over and giving her a hug, finding a small towel to dry her tears with. "It's **okay** , Mindy. You're not going to fail the class."

"I was getting a B for the year," Mindy replied, upset. "And my dad, his company is doing this thing, where only a certain percentage of employee... of, uh, sons and daughters of employees get to go to your grandma's school if they get good grades. If I get any C's at all, someone else gets my spot." Arthur laid a fat bear paw on her shoulder, and his signboard had only a single symbol: **9**.

"Yeah, we're nine, today, we're not supposed to be worrying about this stuff when we're nine," Arial said, and Mindy started sobbing into her towel. Who put that kind of pressure on an ordinary nine-year-old? Mindy wasn't a Dreemurr, she wasn't like Arial, who had-

Who had a choice to make.

Her family had been very clear that she wasn't allowed to let anyone, even her siblings, know if any particular day would actually happen or not. They hadn't said much of anything else as to how she should handle her new ability. She could wait until her mom came home and just ask, but what if the answer was no? Wouldn't it be cheating if Arial helped her with a test after she'd already taken it? Would Mom get mad? Would Grandma get mad? Mindy sobbed again and Arial made her choice. She couldn't let her friend suffer like this, especially not after giving her a locket binding them together. If Mindy was thrown out of Toriel's school and forced back into a regular one, it'd ruin the rest of her life forever. And Arial would not spend the rest of **her** life wishing that she'd used her power to help her friend. "Can you talk to your grandma?" Mindy suddenly asked, eyes hopeful.

"Yeah, I can do that," Arial replied, and Mindy abruptly hugged her, getting tears and a few crumbs of birthday cake on her school dress. _But I won't. It wouldn't work. Grandma would say it wouldn't be fair, and she'd be right._ Whether after-the-fact cheating was fair was something Arial didn't want to think about, and she really didn't want to think about how her grandmother might react. Two decades of being a principal hadn't changed Toriel's base nature, but they had slightly changed her approach to dealing with children. She was still soft-hearted, still kind and loving, but needing to be the disciplinarian had given her steel when she needed it, and she didn't have any patience for liars, bullies, or cheaters. A flash of insight came to Arial: she couldn't let Toriel see Mindy like this, or she'd spot the difference instantly. "Come on. It's our birthday today. Let's just eat cake and have fun today, okay?" She thought up another excuse. "If Nomie and Mander see you crying, they're going to cry too. Even Gary might. They're six. Don't worry about anything until tomorrow. It'll be **okay**. I promise." _I promise never to have made this promise._ Arial's little sister was watching the exchange, and she was chewing her lip nervously. Michelle couldn't remember the last time she saw someone get that upset. "See? You've even gotten Shelly upset."

" **I'm** not upset, **she** is," Michelle replied, and Mindy had to smile and dry her tears because she couldn't be upset in front of her friend's little sister. Mindy started asking about how Michelle's life, and Michelle talked about her favorite books and what she hoped to get for Christmas. Michelle loved pre-Return fantasy, from back before people knew what monsters were and magic became a science. She knew that curses and enchanted items didn't really exist, but she loved pretending that they did. Mindy, who'd never even heard of the genre, was fascinated, and Arial was proud of her little sister for keeping the older girl's mind off her predicament.

Toriel came in then, checking her home and mildly admonishing her sons for chopping up the cake so unevenly. (They'd returned to it multiple times, of course.) The family called her Grandma and the monsters unfailingly called her Your Majesty (mute Arthur bowed deeply), while the other humans uncertainly referred to her as Mrs. Dreemurr. Toriel only glanced at Mindy and Arial breathed a tiny sigh of relief. The party drew to a close; the other girls had to get home, after all, and Toriel sent Sans to drive them. Arial's parents and uncle came home, all at once, and Arial received another Happy Birthday chant. Planning on what to say to her friend the next day, Arial went to sleep nervously that night, but she realized that it didn't matter how much sleep she got; she'd be awoken at the same spot she was at when her mother SAVEd, there in front of her.

From her perspective, she went to sleep and reappeared in front of her mother wide awake, from dreamland to mild anxiety in an instant. _This is going to take a lot of getting used to._ But she'd made her plans. Her uncle smiled at her, running his fluffy fingers through her hair, and she went back to bed, trying not to give anything away. Arial tried her very best to act like it was the first time her little siblings wished her a happy birthday, and she picked out the exact same clothes and ate the exact same breakfast.

Fortunately, Recent American History was the first class of the day; the buses always came early enough that Arial had time to talk to her friends before the teacher came in. "Hey, Mindy, wouldn't this class be totally different if there were no such things as term limits?"

"Term limits?"

"Yeah, the reason all the recent presidents are only eight years. Except for, uh, Carter and Bush. The first Bush, I mean. You remember how that list went, with the years?"

"Yeah, ah... Reagan beat Carter in '80, then it was George Bush in '88, then, uh, Bill Clinton beat him in '92, then there was Al Gore and the hanging chads who lost to, uh, George W. Bush in 2000, then Obama in 2008, and Donald Trump in 2016. Wait, I thought Donald Trump beat Obama?"

"No, he couldn't have. I think he said some stuff about him, but he couldn't have run against him."

"Who'd he... oh, that was Hillary Clinton. That was the election with the email stuff, wasn't it? Oh my God, Arial, you're such a lifesaver. I would have gotten that so wrong, and I **really** can't mess up on this test." _Yeah, I know._

The teacher walked in shortly thereafter, and Arial probably did slightly better the second time around, but she didn't care because she knew she aced it the first time anyway. The rest of the tests were the same way; for some reason, the fat kid didn't puke the second time around, and Mindy was in much higher spirits, so they talked about completely different things on their way up the hill together. Mindy reacted with total, unbridled excitement when presented with the locket, and she listened in fascination when Michelle started talking about her favorite books which Mindy had never heard of. It was, all in all, a much better birthday, and Arial hoped her grandmother wouldn't notice the differences. She seemed not to, and then Frisk came home with her husband and Asriel, and Frisk had whispered in her daughter's ear about a special present for her rememberer girl and Arial had eagerly followed her mother upstairs to her parents' room, only noticing that Toriel had followed her in once the goat had closed the door behind her.

"So, would you like to discuss the difference in Mindy's test scores?" Toriel asked without preamble.

Arial drew in a long, sharp breath. "How did you know? Were you always checking tests or-"

"My child," Toriel said, laying a fluffy hand on her granddaughter's shoulder, "did you not think I knew that your friend had been crying?" Her smile grew wider, and Arial was uncomfortably reminded of sharks. "And the guilt in your expression and voice- yes, you did show it!- I had thought you had done something to hurt her. I spoke with your mother, who suggested what it was before the day had even been repeated."

"Then why didn't you tell me then?" Arial asked.

"And have you miss out on the chance to make your own moral choice?" Frisk rhetorically asked, smiling. "I think we'd all be dodging gasterblasters for a week if Sans heard we did that." Frisk chuckled. "Come on, Arial. A crying friend, a brand-new power, and a guilty expression? You'd never do anything to hurt a friend, but to help her? You couldn't **not** do it, could you? Even if it meant going behind our backs, even if it meant doing things you didn't want to do, even if it meant risking yourself, you couldn't let your friend cry. How could you live with yourself if you did? She was more important than anything that might happen to you." Arial was shocked that her mother understood so well. "I'm just surprised you did it just for a test."

"She'd get thrown out of the school if she failed it," Arial explained. "She said her spot would go to someone else if she got a C for the semester."

" **Seriously?** " Frisk asked, amazed, looking to her own mother. "Mom, is that **right**?"

Toriel scowled. "I should never have let your father make that wretched agreement with that vile company," she told her daughter. There had been an open slot in Toriel's school for a child roughly Arial's age, and she'd foolishly let her husband use it as a bargaining chip. "They seek to use my school as a carrot to dangle in front of their employees. Arial, as far as I am concerned, your friend is now a student here like any other, and if her father's employer wishes to dispute the issue, I will not send Papyrus to negotiate; I will send Charles instead." Frisk pursed her lips and started chortling, her hand covering her mouth. Sending Charles to get her point across was not unlike killing a fly with a flamethrower. "Now, tell me, my child, how exactly did you go about altering your friend's answers?" Arial told her in detail, and Toriel smiled and nodded. "I had hoped you would be so wise. And at such a young age..." She shook her great goat head, her floppy ears waggling much like her natural son's. "The things we do to make our children into adults."

"So, am I in trouble?" Arial asked.

"Oh, heavens no," Toriel replied. "Reminding your friend of things she already knew, to keep her from an unwarranted expulsion? I wish that all the children of the world would get into such trouble. She did much better on all her other tests that day, were you aware? And, I imagine, better on every future examination she will have for a very long time, now that her confidence is improved." She smiled again, and Arial saw no more shark in it but the great big monster smile it always was. "I, too, have placed reminders in certain classes when they did not do as well as I had hoped." Arial's jaw dropped.

"Rememberers help people," Frisk reminded her daughter. "It's why I give the password out at all. It's why I even LOAD and SAVE regularly. Otherwise, what would be the point?"

"So, Undyne probably told that one kid not to eat so many Twinkies before the test..." Arial started.

"If that had caused something bad to happen, she almost certainly did," Toriel said. "I would expect no less of her, nor would I expect less of you. Now, come along for dinner, my little rememberer. Cake cannot be your only meal this evening." Beaming with joy, Arial decided that Christmas would have to be absolutely fantastic to be better than her birthday.


	4. Temmas

Temmie, a sloppy paintbrush in her mouth and red-and-green paint all over her body, put the finishing touches on the "MERRY TEMMAS" cardboard sign just outside the entrance to the school gym, as Temmie, Temmie, and Temmie put together the cardboard indoor tree. Meanwhile, Temmie and Temmie set out human food, including bulk amounts of chocolate, oodles of store-bought Christmas cookies (Toriel disapproved, but she and Gary couldn't cook everything), and several huge pitchers of egg nog, which super-really weren't allowed to have any Temmie Flakes in them. Bob wrapped up a bunch of presents.

The Dreemurrs came in a few minutes before the official noon opening. By tradition, King Asgore Dreemurr walked in first, his wife at his side, although he wasn't feeling very kingly walking into her school. She'd given him a short but profound tongue-lashing about him offering that slot at her school, and he had meekly replied that he had no idea that the company would be so cold-hearted with it. Their son rolled in by himself after them (his roller shoes were, of course, custom-made, not just size 30 but a nonhuman shape), his nephews and nieces rolling behind him wearing backpacks full of presents; only Arial had a box big enough to need carrying, although it was very lightweight. They weren't used to going to functions like this without their parents, but Charles was too scary and Frisk was too allergic, and, besides, anything run by Temmies couldn't really be called a 'function'.

"hOI, yOIr mOIjestOI!" the Temmies shouted, bowing. The one with a paintbrush in her mouth kept it there, leaving a splat of red paint on the much-abused gym floor. "welcome to TEMMAS!" The kids laughed at the sight. It looked like a lot of five-year-olds had gone berserk with cheap decorations, tinsel, plastic, and construction paper, with the sole instruction of "do something Christmasy". James briefly considered using his finger lasers to laser-point the Temmies into a riot that would surely turn the room to further chaos, because that's what they'd done to his house, although he didn't want even the remotest chance of lighting anything on fire- the whole place would probably go up with a gigantic FWOOMPH, with sooty Temmies flying out the doors.

Instead, the kids made a beeline for the candy and cookies. Arial was going to say something about her siblings not eating before other kids got there, but there already were a few, and she spotted-

"Arrie!" Mindy squealed, hustling up to her friend, wiping chocolate off her face with a napkin. They looked at each other and laughed. Frisk had given her kids matching Christmas clothing, and apparently Mindy's parents had the same idea, although Mindy's dress wasn't made of Dreemurr fur and she didn't have anything to match the dark blue heart on Arial's chest. "Dad told me that I'm always going to be going to this school until I graduate," she confided. "His boss called him up, and Dad said that his boss was scared. Like really scared. Did you do something? Did your **dad**?"

"Maybe, I don't know," Arial replied honestly, shrugging and looking past her friend to the food, not noticing Asgore's guilty expression. He'd used the words 'pray I don't alter it any further' and made one passing reference to his (technically) human son. Mindy decided not to keep talking about it.

Arial's siblings were going after the sugar with aplomb. Shelly was sampling everything, a bit of chocolate here, a bit of cookie there, a small laser-slice of a Christmas ham there. It didn't really satisfy her; she far preferred Gary's and her grandmother's cooking to premade, by-the-numbers food, although she noticed Gary stashing several handfuls of chocolates in a plastic bag, which he quickly stashed into his backpack. She guessed who they were for. James was trying to act grown-up about it, but Mander and Nomie were six-year-olds with lots of sugar to eat. Which was the party's theme, after all.

"SONG tEM!" one of the Temmies shouted, and all of them broke out into a carol, the kids awkwardly following along.

we wish u a merri TEMMAS~

we wish u a merri TEMMAS~

we wish u a merri TEMMAS and a happOI nu YEER!

gud TIDINGZ we BRING, for u and ur ken~

gud TIDINGZ 4 TEMMAS an-a happOI nu YEER!

"GIFT tEM!" one of the Temmies shouted at the end, and the kids came forward with their gifts. Most of them were uncertain, only used to receiving gifts instead of giving them, and they had the same idea as the three youngest Dreemurrs: their parents had taken them to the nearest dollar stores and big-box shops to pick up cheap toys with lots of flashing lights and sounds. There weren't any Gyftrots there to help; all the Gyftrots and the variants of Santa Claus that had been dreamt up were at poor kids' houses. Even the Krampuses (Krampi?) had no purpose on Mt. Ebbot.

Michelle started to step forward, but a fluffy paw appeared on her shoulder and a snootle approached her ear. "Considering what your gift will do, you should give it last," Asriel advised his niece. She nodded and petted his long ear, since it was right there, and let the other kids give their gifts. James, fully intending them to drive themselves insane (it was justice, after all), smugly gave them three laser pointers and a series of mirrors. Arial, being precociously wise about these things, gave them her present: a heavily wrapped cardboard box full of bubble-wrapped packing peanuts.

"Where's the **gift**?" Nomie asked, and Arial simply pointed at how much fun the Temmies were having. Enlightenment came to her that day.

"Okay, my turn," Michelle said. She opened her bag and took to the air, flying five feet over the Temmies' heads. Slowly, as if pouring rock salt on ice, she let a stream of mass-cut Temmie Flakes pour out of her bag, the construction paper fluttering to the floor in waves. Her uncle was right- the Temmies went nuts, dropping the other presents in a wave of "TEMMIE FLAKES!" and "flakes 4 tEM?!", jumping on the stream like ducks after bread. Everyone else in the room, children and adults, clapped and laughed. Michelle did a complete circuit around the tree, a horde of Temmies behind her, before ffoating to the floor, bag empty and body exhausted.

The kids opened up Bob's presents then, one box per kid, but most of them were utterly confused. "What the heck is **this**?!" one of James' friends exclaimed, holding up a Trapper Keeper.

"I have no idea, what's **this** thing for?!" another kid asked, examining a TI calculator. The package had tricked him into believing it was a particularly thick phone, something he could play The Elder Scrolls 9 on.

"Is this a **lunchbox**?!" Mindy asked, opening up her present. It looked neat, and it was made of steel, but she went to Toriel's school so she'd never used one before.

"Oh, wow, this map is so old," Michelle said, examining the theme of a three-ring binder. It had countries she'd only vaguely heard of before, such as the USSR, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. She snapped the three rings in and out repeatedly, wondering how they were used. "Hey, if you don't want this old stuff, I'll buy it," she told the kids, who eagerly crowded towards her. Being only seven years old, she was only allowed to carry several hundred dollars, and she drastically overpaid for most of it, shoving ancient gel pens and protractors by the handful into her purple, heavily adorned backpack. (Her uncle and grandparents didn't complain. It was, after all, Christmas.) Michelle treasured any insight she could get into the lives of ordinary pre-magic girls, but old TV shows didn't get across the reality and her mother had never been ordinary. Her siblings gave her their presents for free; the only one who didn't was James, as the Temmies had specifically given him a suit of Temmie Armor as a peace offering. He asked them how they'd made it, and they only said it was because of their college education. He had no idea what it was made from, only that it definitely wasn't cardboard. He put it on happily, wondering if his father should be wearing something like this, but Temmies didn't make armor in adult sizes, and it was only really good against simple stuff that wouldn't even hurt his dad, like fire and baseball bats.

The Temmies started playing with the presents they got, and the kids couldn't help but join in, particularly the little ones, as the parents treated it like an ice cream social. Asriel was called upon to "please, just feel" five different ailments, all of which were related to tension and only one of which really needed his chirurgic touch. ("I keep telling you humans to ease off on the salt, but nobody listens...") Some of the parents talked to Toriel and her husband, scaring various children; their **parents** were talking to the **principal**! Mander was playing tag with five Temmies at once, literally bouncing off the walls and ceiling with the sugar in his system, while his twin sister bounced three Superballs around at once.

Eventually, there was nothing left but crumbs and empty pitchers, the wastebasket full of plastic cups, and Temmas drew to a close, the other kids waving their Dreemurr friends goodbye. Toriel had made the little monsters promise to clean up, and they cleaned up in the most Temmie way possible: by throwing all their waste, even the giant cardboard tree, into large bags labeled TEMMAS JUNK and tossing them into the school dumpsters, where they'd be picked up to be eventually reprocessed into more cheap junk. Another bag marked TEMMAS SWAG held all the presents the kids had given them, and the Temmies carried that bag on their backs like a swarm of army ants up the hill to their home.

"What do you think of them now?" Toriel asked her grandchildren as their red-and-green snow boots tromped up the hill.

"They're all right," Gary replied, "as long as they're not in our house." His siblings, laughing, agreed with him.

"That reminds me, hold on," Asriel said, holding his hands above the children, generating a bit of static cling to peel the dander off their clothes and hair, paying special attention to James' Temmie Armor. "Your mother would not appreciate you bringing that much Temmie into the house. Shelly, vacuum your school supplies once you unpack them, okay?"

"Mmm-hmm," the little girl replied, already thinking of how to catalog and store them, still proud of herself for walking home with so much. She had a trove of ancient girl stuff, and she'd bought most of it with ordinary money!

Their parents greeted them as they rushed in the door, listening to their childish, detailed explanations of all the food they'd eaten and all the fun they'd had and how Shelly had bought everybody's Temmie presents. Frisk took one look at the inside of Michelle's backpack and understood at once. She rushed into her room to toss it on her bed, and her older brother did the same with his armor.

"Hey, Dad, I've got something for you," Gary called out, and revealed his bag full of chocolates. Charles gave him a big hug and did not disappoint his son by picking at it; rather, he machine-gunned chocolate after chocolate into his open mouth, greedily chewing away, savoring the delicious taste as he had when he was younger.

"Well, kids, since you had so much fun at Temmas, we've decided to cancel Christmas this year," Frisk solemnly informed her children. Not a single one of them, not even the six-year-olds, took her seriously. "We've conquered age, but youth is still so fleeting," she said, shaking her head and sighing with a smile on her lips. "All right, you get to have Christmas as well, but this is the last time, okay?" Serious-taking: Zero. Chuckling again, Frisk unveiled the latest techno-goodies her kids wanted, but it was just **stuff** and the kids had plenty of that. Bouncing around in her head was the question any good parent asks: _Did I raise them right?_ As her children snuggled next to each other on the couch in their soft Christmasy sweaters with their colored hearts on their chests, playing the latest Telltale 'No, Really, Your Choices Actually Matter, We Super-de-Duper Promise This Time' game by majority vote on the choices, Frisk decided that she had.

Asgore and Toriel sat together, watching their children and grandchildren, quietly thanking something, somewhere for letting them have such a family.

A small, white dog lifted itself up by the forepaws to peer in the Dreemurr windowsill, locking eyes with Charles for the briefest of moments before running away into the snow. Enjoying Christmas with his family, he chose not to pursue it.


End file.
